Les Troyens is opera at its most epic. The sheer scale of its story, music, passion, staging and performers make this one of the great Royal Opera events of the decade. Berlioz's great work is one of the most fabulously rich of all operas, a tour de force of passion in music, with extraordinarily demanding roles for the principal cast.

The story is taken from Virgil's great poem The Aeneid and dramatises the fall of Troy and Enée's (Aeneas) doomed affair with Didon (Dido), Queen of Carthage. It brings alive a wealth of human emotions set against the monumental canvas of the rise and fall of the empires. This new production by celebrated director David McVicar (whose work for The Royal Opera includes Rigoletto, Adriana Lecouvreur and Salome) is on an impressive scale. The extraordinary world-class cast includes Jonas Kaufmann as the heroic Enée, Eva-Marie Westbroek as his beloved Didon and Anna Caterina Antonacci as the doomed propetess Cassandre, under the baton of Antonio Pappano. Designs are by Es Devlin and Moritz Junge. With such a team, this promises to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.